Face
it—the idea of universal college education is a bust. Virtually
everybody goes to college nowadays, and what have we got to show for it?
Sky-high tuition, bottomless pits of student loan debt, and uncounted
hordes of young people who can’t get jobs because they don’t
know how to work and jolly well don’t want to.

There’s
only one thing you can still get out of college—the chance to become
an intellectual.

You
can, of course, remain in college all your life. What else are you going
to do with a degree in Gender Studies, except to teach Gender Studies?
This is why everybody has to go to college: there’s no other way
to employ the graduates. How many professorships would go extinct if only
5% of every generation went to college?

Consider:
you’ve just finished four, five, or six years of college. You’re
on the hook for $150,000 in student loans. You have a degree in Diversity
Studies, but there are no more openings for Diversity Studies professors
and instructors, and when you present your credentials to prospective
employers in the private sector, they’re sure you must be joking.
You’ve probably had to go back home to live with mommy and daddy,
or else you share a hut or a rented room with a bunch of other unemployable
college graduates.

The
only thing that makes this bearable is your conviction that at least you’re
smarter than those working stiffs out there. Whatever else you may or
may not be, you are an intellectual. Or could be.

But
did you really need to lay out all that money to become an intellectual?
Did you really need to go to college?

No way!

What
is an intellectual? Nothing more than this: anyone who is recognized as
an intellectual by other intellectuals. And you don’t need to spend
a dime on college to achieve that.

Here’s
how.

An intellectual
loathes America—so be loudly and consistently anti-American. You
can pick it up easily by listening to other intellectuals; with just a
few days’ practice, you can fit right in. Let people know you believe
that every other country in the world is better than America—more
just, wiser, more peaceful, culturally superior, with a more planet-friendly
way of life, blah-blah. No one but an intellectual would ever say China
is better than America. So that’s the kind of thing you’ve
got to say.

An intellectual
despises Christianity and Christians. The top intellectuals are all atheists,
although you can get away with being “spiritual” or outright
pagan as long as you display disdain for Christianity. Practice blurting
out such slogans as “Christianity kills” or “Christian
Taliban”—always bearing in mind that any criticism of the
real Taliban will be viewed as hopelessly un-intellectual, tantamount
to hate speech. The real Taliban cuts women’s noses off; but when
was the last time you heard a feminist intellectual say a word against
them?

An intellectual
abhors capitalism and always denounces “greed” and “materialism.”
Keep on denouncing it, even if you happen to get rich. Your fellow intellectuals
will never notice the hypocrisy—as witness their unfailing adulation
of zillionaire politicians and entertainers who travel all over the world
in private jets to denounce other rich people with private jets. It cannot
be shown that intellectuals understand the word “hypocrisy.”

An intellectual
believes in absurd, ridiculous things—the sillier, the better. George
Orwell said some ideas are so asinine, only an intellectual could possibly
believe in them. So when in doubt, go for “asinine.” If an
idea is preposterous on the face of it (e.g. “open borders,”
or “a guaranteed living wage for everyone, whether they work or
not”), or repeatedly shown up in history as a total and abject failure
(e.g. communism, socialism—and, come to think of it, universal college),
that’s all the more reason for you to embrace it and shout it from
the housetops.

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Here
we have an embarrassment of poverty, a cornucopia of inanity. Absurd ideas
cost nothing, so suck up and spit out as many of them as your cranium
can hold. Go whole-hog: man-made Global Warming, and global climate management
by statist dolts who take away your light bulbs; the gender continuum
(don’t ask); Canadian “human rights” commissions; multiculturalism;
values clarification education; Barack Obama… But why go on? Each
one’s as silly as the next. And if you’re strapped for dopy
ideas, the easiest thing in the world is to echo other intellectuals.
Whatever they’re saying, you should say, too. The result will be
a beautiful uniformity of thought which you can call “diversity.”

You
can’t occupy Wall Street forever. Sooner or later you’ll have
to go back to school, back home to ma-ma, back to the commune, or whatever.
But one thing you can keep forever, college degree or no degree, is your
standing as an intellectual.

Lee Duigon,
a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper
reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist.
He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new
fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar,
available on www.amazon.com

You
can’t occupy Wall Street forever. Sooner or later you’ll have
to go back to school, back home to ma-ma, back to the commune, or whatever.
But one thing you can keep forever, college degree or no degree, is your
standing as an intellectual.